Contact

News

Katie Breyer and Jack Barendt are undergraduate students in Classics. Jack is also a Semple Scholar. The recently reported on their year abroad at the Centro in Rome:

While our studies at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (the “Centro”) are based in Rome, our classes and experiences are not limited to the city itself. As students of the Classics, we have gained the opportunity to put what we have learned from the University of Cincinnati’s Classics Department into a more tangible context. One of the most exciting aspects of the program is that classes are held on site, allowing us to reconstruct the ancient city through frequent site visits, such as to the Imperial Fora, the Curia in the Roman Forum, and the halls of Nero’s infamous Domus Aurea. And yet, we are not limited to Rome, visiting sites around the Bay of Naples, as well as Sicily, such as Pompeii, Cumae, Syracuse, and Agrigento.

We came from the University of Cincinnati with a wide range of experiences and skills and interests; from the archaeological and material to the language and history of Rome. The Classics department provided us with the foundations we needed to in order to more fully engage with the currriculum at the Centro. The Centro has allowed us to expand upon what we already knew as well as challenged us to examine the Roman world through a closer perspective. Our experience at the Centro has made us eager to return to the department and more fully engage in our classes. We will bring different perspectives into the classroom and enagage the younger students with an interest in understanding the Roman world. We are incredibly grateful for all that the Classics Department has done for us, allowing us to enjoy such an enriching experience and promoting our studies of the Classics.

Classics congratulates alumnus Tom Tsuchiya (Class Civ ’95) who won the 2016 Arts & Sciences Distinguish Alumni award. Tom is a sculptor with roots in the humanistic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. In Cincinnati he is famous for his portraits of Cincinnati Reds baseball players in front of Great American Ballpark. In these bronze sculptures, he captures the personality and character of his subjects, often spending time getting to know them before starting a design. He is now the official sculptor of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, responsible for the plaques with relief portraits dedicated to honor inductees. In every case his aim is to reflect the character and achievements of his subjects, their ethos and pathos, concepts he learned here, in the Blegen Library.

Tom also runs an environmentally responsible studio and gives back to the community. His “Atlas Recycled” sculpture emphasizes the importance of environmental stewardship for the future of our planet. Like Atlas, we hold the Earth in our hands. Young apprentices from Boys Hope/Girls Hope often help out in his studio, and gleaming metallic commission doubles as a receptacle for donated canned goods.

“Atlas Recycled” will soon be installed in the lobby of Blegen Library. Stay tuned for updates and an opening celebration.

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg’s wider research focuses on the intersection of drama, politics, and memory in early Imperial Rome. All of these interests contributed to her new book: Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia out from Oxford University Press this December. This book focuses on a play named after Nero’s wife, Octavia, which happens to be the sole surviving history play from ancient Rome. The Octavia dramatizes the notorious age of Nero, the emperor’s murder of his first wife, and the events that led to his fall from power. At the core of her book is a question of the role that literature, and especially drama, plays in the way that we remember the past.

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In Staging Memory, Staging Strife, Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the contests over memory after Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife with a ruling family waging war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord.

In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg contextualizes the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire.

Hollywood and modern pop culture often view Nero as the evilest of Rome’s evils. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to question the basis of this image: what sources do we have for it? In whose interest was it that Nero be remembered as a monster? This book takes these questions back to their beginning by examining how Roman drama and the stage reinterpreted Neronian history for a world without Nero.

Another issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists has just appeared at Cincinnati. It is a volume of over 450 pages, with text editions and essays as well as shorter notes and reviews on a great variety of topics having to do with Greco-Roman Egypt. Highlights are two articles presenting Greek papyri from the earliest Roman period. One edits four poll tax receipts, which add substantially to what we know about taxation in early Roman Egypt. The other edits four labor contracts, two for a girl under the age of ten, who will feed olives into an oil press and do other chores as needed by her employer. There are very few texts that are as explicit about child labor in antiquity.

Peter van Minnen has been editor-in-chief of this international journal since 2006. Many graduate students at Cincinnati, in summer institutes, and at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens have publishing their first articles in BASP, some assisting van Minnen in the production of the journal.

Step into the Sherie and Len Marek Family Gallery at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and you are greeted by faces from the past -- two rows of ancient sculptures from the ancient Mediterranean and Egypt. Visible through the doorway at the other end of the room, a larger than life marble lion crouches, ready to spring off a pedestal in the Millard F. Rogers Jr. Gallery. Here, you will find the oldest piece in the museum: a red and black clay vessel from ancient Egypt's Naqada culture, decorated with an incised Barbary sheep.

On October 3, 2015, the Cincinnati Art Museum opened two new permanent galleries to display their collections of ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. This undertaking was the product of collaboration between students and faculty from UC, especially graduate students from the Department of Classics, and the Curatorial and Learning & Interpretation departments at the CAM. The partnership re-established ties between the distinguished Classics community at UC and the CAM, a fixture of the greater Cincinnati area since 1886. The invitation to be part of the re-installation of the antiquities collections was presented to Professor Kathleen Lynch by Museum Director Cameron Kitchin in February 2015, and the immediate answer was an enthusiastic yes.

The Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati invites applications for a tenure track position at the level of Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient History, to begin on August 15, 2016. Candidates are expected to be able to teach Ancient History at the undergraduate and graduate levels and Ancient Greek and Latin and Classical Civilization at the undergraduate level. A Ph.D. in Classics, History, or a related field by the time of the appointment is required. Tenure-track faculty are expected to make original contributions to knowledge through research and publication, to teach undergraduate and graduate courses, to advise and mentor undergraduate and graduate students, and to fulfill reasonable service obligations to the scholarly and local communities. Preliminary inquiries can be addressed to Kathleen Lynch, Chair, Ancient History Search Committee, with subject line “Ancient History Search:” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..Candidates must apply online at https://jobs.uc.edu and search for Requisition #7601. In addition to completing the online application form, cadidates should attach a cover letter (letter of application), a curriculum vitae and a writing sample with the online application. In addition, three confidential letters of reference should be sent via e-mail to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with the subject line "Ancient History Search". The committee will review applications starting November 15, 2015, and conduct interviews at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Francisco, January 6-9, 2016. The position will remain open until filled.The University of Cincinnati, founded in 1819, is a premier, public, urbanresearch university located in the heart of Cincinnati, Ohio. The university boastsa student body of over 43, 000 enrolled in over 370 programs of study and is the region’s largest employer with over 15, 000 faculty, staff and student workers. The University of Cincinnati embraces diversity and inclusion as core values and seeks to empower all members of the university community. The University of Cincinnati is ranked as one of America’s top 26 public research universities by the National Science Foundation. U.S. News has ranked UC in the Top Tier of America’s Best Colleges. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls UC a “research heavyweight”. Forbes, Delta Sky and Travel + Leisure magazines have named UC one of the most beautiful campuses.The University of Cincinnati is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer with a strong commitment to diversity. We actively seek a broad spectrum of candidates including women, people of color, people with disabilities, and veterans.The University of Cincinnati is an Affirmative Action / Equal Opportunity Employer / M / F / Vet / Disabled.